As Stephanie Jacobs drove to collect her 14-year-old son Max from a sleepover, she was in a hurry to get back to central Manchester to pick up her daughter. So when she was begged to come into the house, she began to worry that Max had disgraced himself. Had he smashed a family heirloom, or drawn on a wall with felt-tip pen?
She inched through the door with a fixed smile on her face, expecting the worst. Instead she was greeted with looks of excited anticipation from Max and his hosts. Stephanie didn’t understand what was going on, but reluctantly took a seat.
“The boys have realised something amazing,” said Jude Moryoussef, the mother of Max’s friend Sol.
“Really?” said Stephanie, confused. “What exactly…” She trailed off, not sure what was coming.
“Our families are deeply connected,” replied Jude. “You see, my husband’s grandfather is Stephen Salisbury. I showed Max his picture hanging on the wall in the kitchen.”
For a few seconds Stephanie couldn’t say anything. “It was just shock, absolute and utter shock,” she says as she remembers that moment. Stephen Salisbury was the man she credited with giving her the life she had. He was her saviour.
This story starts in Llandudno in 1966. It was the year when John Lennon declared that the Beatles are more famous than Jesus, in July England won the World Cup, and in November the searing Ken Loach drama Cathy Come Home aired in black and white on one of the UK’s only two television channels. Against this background, Dr Stephen Salisbury was a GP in the North Wales town, and a mainstay of its small but vibrant Jewish community.
“He was empathetic,” says Gilly Moryoussef, Jude’s mother-in-law. “My father was beloved, he was special.”
One day, a woman came into his surgery with her 22-year-old daughter, who was pregnant and unwed. They’d come to Llandudno to arrange adoption and escape the shame. Dr Salisbury started organising the paperwork, and though they didn’t mention faith or ethnicity he soon realised they were Jewish.
As a man who had been through the Second World War, he had borne witness to the Holocaust and knew what his people had endured. For Dr Salisbury, every Jewish life was precious, so he hated the idea of a Jewish baby going to a Christian family.
The only two Jewish adoption agencies at the time were London-based, says Dr Michael Lambert of Lancaster University. Elsewhere, Christian charities ran many of the mother-and-baby homes and in practice were the official channel for adoptions. “It wasn’t uniquely Church of England, but they were the big player,” he says.
Reluctant to let the child go by default to an Anglican family, Dr Salisbury asked the women’s permission to find a Jewish one and spread word through his social network. Colleagues soon identified a couple in nearby Manchester who were desperate to welcome the baby.
Stephanie Jacobs as a child[Missing Credit]
Max Jacobs (right) and Sol Moryoussef[Missing Credit]
Gilly Moryoussef[Missing Credit]
They were so grateful to Dr Salisbury they named the little girl after him. Today Stephanie Jacobs is 59. She has long blonde hair with highlights and a battle-worn look. She’s gone through the devastating experience of losing a child and survived cancer twice, but alongside that double pain is clearly still haunted by the story of her own origins. To respect her birth mother’s confidentiality, she calls her “Paula”, which is not her real name.
“I don’t know if Paula even saw me so I do not know how maternal she was to me.
“Dr Salisbury took me home the same evening. What is sure is that Paula never had much time, if any, to bond with me.”
By her twenties, despite a happy childhood with loving parents including an “amazing” mum, Stephanie wanted to meet her birth family. She knew which town Paula lived in, and in the days before strict privacy laws, it took nothing more than a quick call to the local synagogue to get an address. But when she drove there with a group of friends, she was too nervous to go to the door herself, so one of the other girls knocked. Stephanie’s grandparents answered and weren’t at all pleased. “They said, ‘Don’t you ever come here again.’”
It took a while to overcome that rejection, but a few years later Stephanie decided to seek out Dr Salisbury hoping he could put her in touch with her birth mother. By then he lived in Liverpool. “This elderly-sounding man answered the phone,” recalls Stephanie. “I said, ‘you probably don’t remember me’. But he went, ‘I remember you very well.’ And he said, ‘I remember your mother.’” She hesitates. “That made me cry, because no one had ever acknowledged knowing Paula.”
The doctor invited Stephanie for brunch, and she says “I just remember him being very loving and nice,” but more than that, he offered to broker an introduction to Paula.
The meeting took place in the cavernous Strand Palace Hotel in central London. The two women talked, Paula gave her daughter a Magen David necklace and a picture of her own family. “I so badly wanted to feel a connection with her,” says Stephanie, “So yes I did feel it.” She sounds just a little doubtful, as though she is still trying to convince herself.
“I show my friends her picture on Facebook, and they go ‘OMG. You’re the double of her!’” she says.
Paula didn’t have any more children, but what really stings for Stephanie is the fact that she never told even her closest family about the daughter she gave up.
“I really am the dirty, dirty secret,” she says. The positive feelings about her adoption are focused on her loving parents but also on the man she regards as her saviour, Dr Stephen Salisbury.
Fast forward 20 years, and after Stephanie’s son Max has met Solly Moryoussef at Habonim, they have become firm friends. When the boys were 14, they had that fateful sleepover.
The next morning, the subject of the Welsh seaside town of Llandudno came up in conversation.
For a moment, Max went quiet, says Gilly Moryoussef. “He then said, ‘My mum was born in Llandudno.’ And then, ‘She was saved by a Jewish doctor.’
“My daughter-in-law Judith then started to scream, “But that’s our grandpa!”’ She recognised the story from those few words, because his role in ensuring that Stephanie went to a Jewish family had been one of Dr Salisbury’s proudest achievements. His family knew all about it and understood exactly what was meant by “saved”.
As Gilly puts it: “He didn’t save her life. He saved her Jewish life.”
Now in their mid-20s, Max and Solomon continue to be close friends. “If you saw this on EastEnders or Coronation Street, you wouldn’t believe it,” says Stephanie. And, in fact, the story only came to light by chance when Gilly responded to an appeal for memories of Llandudno for an exhibition being organised by the Jewish History Association of Wales (JHAW).
Stephanie says her deepest wish is not to be a “dirty secret” anymore, but she also understands that expecting Paula to change is unrealistic. Instead, she has found compensation in the friendship of the family that played such a role in her destiny.
As Gilly says, “This is something more than coincidence. It is huge. My parents would have been so thrilled.”
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